I have no experience with pdflib and PDF::Template (is pdflib an external library?) and
there might be more settings that interfere, e.g. what is your systems default charset?
Is the charset of your shell the system charset, or does it differ?

the to_from is dropping off the accented character and everything after it ... Terán becomes Ter ...

and yes, PDFlib is an external library. i suspect the problem essentially lies there ... not being too well versed in character set issues, i'm not sure what the system default is. i could force PDFlib to use another character set (by pulling in pdflib_pm and forcing a value into <code> $pdflib_pm:PDF_character_enc

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other